Patience
Patience means that the terrible twos will likely be... well... terrible. Children are not little adults, they don’t have the brain structure to be reasonable, and they need your help to handle unruly emotions. And even with your help, that will take time. You will need the patience to wait out these developmental stages.

Many times the answer to most of the perplexing parenting questions is patience. How do you get your baby to sleep through the night? Patience, in time he will. How do you get your toddler to stop taking the bottle? Comfort yourself that by the time she’s in college she won’t take a bottle, so it will work itself out. How do you potty train your child? Wait until they’re old enough to understand what Disneyland is so you can tell him: “When you go poopy on the potty for a whole week, you get to go to Disneyland.”

While there are many effective strategies for solving these problems, as a parent you have to choose your battles. You can’t read every parenting book, and they all contradict each other anyway. Most doctors say the way to get a baby to sleep is to let her cry it out. Some people say you’ll scar your child for life by letting her cry it out. Many seasoned moms say . . . patience.

Flipping Off the Status Quo
Depending on where you live, the status quo will be different. But there are some similarities across time and history. For many women the status quo means that mothers should:

• Put children’s needs before own needs
• Do most of the housework even if you work outside the home
• Take most of the blame if there’s a problem
• Act as if nothing has changed at your workplace after you have kids
• Be the one who loses sleep
• Nurture children so that they are above average in social, intellectual and physical development.

As if these demands were not enough, in some parts of the country mothers are oppressed by the following expectations:

• Feed baby only organic baby food you make yourself
• Baby must learn sign language
• Baby must be stimulated by all sorts of classes and playgroups daily
• Mothers and daughters must wear matching animal print outfits.

I remember one time talking to a friend of mine who lived on the east coast about the exhaustion of keeping up with two young children and the constant sense of guilt we both felt about never doing enough. I told her about my guilt that I didn’t carry my baby everywhere I went, but used a stroller instead of a sling. She thought I was crazy. She wasn’t burdened by the expectations of attachment parenting. She said it was hard enough just keeping up the demands of being good enough. She couldn’t imagine feeling guilty about pushing her baby in a stroller.

Every mother has some status quo she would be well served to question and challenge. For some this may mean challenging the idea that they have to keep the house clean. For others it may mean giving themselves permission to walk out of the house on a Saturday morning telling her husband she’s going golfing. In some suburbs it may mean refusing to dress herself and her daughters in matching animal print clothes.

The SAT’s
When I speak to parents about my book, The Gift of ADHD: How to Transform Your Child’s Problems into Strengths (2005), I often tell them that part of the problem was the unrelenting performance demands on kids these days. I tell them stories about learning to trust that if their child was passionately interested in something outside of getting good grades in school, it might mean that their school days were irrelevant to what they were meant to do with their life.

Some parents hated to hear this and were haunted by a deep fear: “But what about the SAT?” While many children who get the diagnosis of Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) are capable of getting high scores on the SAT, I worried about the loss of perspective I encountered. So fierce were parents concerns, I actually had to double check to make sure that there was no law that said that taking the SAT was mandatory.

To answer the question about the SAT, I learned to respond with another question: “What did Lance Armstrong get on his SAT scores?” After a few blank stares, I would tell the audience that the correct answer was “Who cares?” His ultimate career choice and contribution to the world would have nothing to do with how he did on the SAT’s. Lance Armstrong’s mother said he was a poster child for ADHD when he was growing up because he had so much energy. Children grow up to do amazing things that will have nothing to do with their scores on the SAT. Parents everywhere are oppressed by the narrow and rigid ideas about career choices and what success means.

At one speaking event, after my Lance Armstrong comment, a young woman came up to me in tears, unable to get words out. The first words she spoke were “thank you.” She told me that she had never taken the SAT because she knew she would bomb it. She had been diagnosed with ADHD and for many years felt worthless. She went on to tell me a success story. Though she had never taken the SAT, she made her way through a Master’s degree program. She had gone to a Junior College, done well and had made her way through advanced degrees at fine universities.

I think the SAT can be important, but I was surprised by the loss of perspective. What happened to careers such as builders, artists, entertainers, salespeople? Sonia Choquette, an author and intuitive counselor writes in her book, The Wise Child (1999, Three Rivers) that many times when parents come to see her for a consultation about a child’s addiction, many times she sees that the child’s artistic gifts have been cut off. She writes, “these children are often the sons and daughters of well-intentioned, ambitious people who don’t recognize the spiritual value of their children’s artistic interests and so have discouraged them in support of more ‘serious’ studies or athletic activities. These very children are so often the souls who have come to earth to help us all heal by giving us music, song, poetry, dance, sculpture, and all other art forms that nurture our souls” (p. 208).

Fortunately, there seems to be some signs that these unrealistic and harsh standards are changing.

Just Be It
One time I was driving out of a garage and my son saw some people through a window in an office building. He said, “What are they doing?” I told him they were working. He said, “Why?” Much to my shame, the first thing that popped out of my mouth was, “to make money.” The moment I said it, I knew had just betrayed everything I really believed.

I set him right, “People work because it’s fun. People work because it fills their soul. People work to help the world.” I giggled as I heard him say “fills their soul” knowing he couldn’t really understand that part yet. But I realized how pervasive the cultural pressure is to think that work is for money. There would be no way to explain that to a two year old who knows that money is fun to play with and loves to put quarters in parking meters. “Sure quarters are cool, but is that what’s it’s really all about?” – he would think. I could never let any child of mine think that for a full minute.
Teaching your child how to have fun might also be the biggest preventative medicine against many parents’ biggest fears – substance abuse. Why do many kids turn to drugs and alcohol in their teens? To feel good. To have fun. To get high.

If you teach them from the earliest years how to feel good and have fun, they will be immunized from needing chemical methods of getting high. Also, if you are overly focused on performance demands and achievement, kids may turn to drugs to help them achieve more. If they don’t learn to be enough in the moment, then no matter what they achieve it’s never enough. Kids may think they need stimulants to keep up with all of the demands to achieve. Kids may use alcohol or pot to get a break from incessant demands to perform at the highest levels.

Having fun may be the answer to the obesity epidemic with kids. Why do people eat sweets and junk food? Because it makes them feel good. If you can teach your kids how to have fun, how to feel good, then they can use food as fuel for their fun activities. When kids or grown-ups use food to manage their feelings and give them the high that we all need, the result is poor health and weight problems.

As a parent, you can cut to the chase by teaching your kids how to relax, how to have fun, and that life is bigger than achievement and performance. This doesn’t mean you don’t respect high achievements or instill in them the value of working hard. It just means that you give them a sense of perspective.

By focusing on fun, you also give them a sense of direction. When children learn to value their sense of fun, it can be a compass for them to choose a life direction. Who is going to be the greatest at what they do? The person who loves what they do and is having fun doing it.

To help you focus on being more fun and thereby being a model for your children, you can get a start by figuring out how you can meet your child’s needs at the same time you increase the fun that you are having while parenting. You should never feel like parenting is watching the clock move too slowly while you are bored out of your mind. You are short-changing yourself and your child if you live like that.

One way to get out of a parenting rut is to make a list of things you already love to do. Do these things while you are parenting. If you love to dance, give your kids dance lessons. If you love to hike in nature, take your kids with you. If there are things your kids love to do that you dislike intensely, limit your commitment to these activities or figure out how you can do something useful or fun while you are engaged in these activities. I don’t particularly enjoy playing board games meant to be stimulating to the minds of 5 year old children. When I play with my kids I will do some stretching like simple yoga poses to keep me happy and I’ll limit myself to one game at a time then move on to an activity more interesting to me.

After you list activities you feel passionate about, write out a plan for increasing these activities in your parenting. For example, if you recognized that you used to love hamming it up but have gotten lost in piles of laundry, then think of ways to spend your time with kids that involve dancing, singing, performance or entertainment.

Write a list of parenting activities that you do not enjoy at all. Problem solve about how to minimize those activities. In your problem solving, keep in mind, that many times the answer involves giving yourself permission to do things less than perfectly but good enough. For example, if you hate cooking, you could feed your kids very healthy foods with minimal effort. You could serve raw foods which are healthy but don’t involve cooking. You could allow yourself to serve meals that include sandwiches, soups, or cook frozen foods or even frozen meals. You could refuse to be a short order cook and serve fruit and yoghurt each time your child turns up her nose at the meal. There are many ways for you to meet your child’s needs without draining away your life energy. Also you can problem solve about how to make activities you hate more fun. Can you listen to your ipod while you do laundry? Can you time yourself and count laundry as exercise, counting the calories you burn? If you get creative and give yourself permission to have fun, you can completely change the landscape of parenting so that you are having at least as much fun as your kids!


For more tips and tools about parenting visit http://www.visionarysoul.com.

To listen to Dr. Honos-Webb's internet radio interview with IP Editor in Chief, Sandie Sedgbeer, click here...

SPECIAL NOTE: As an expert in ADHD, Lara has created a number of FREE video tips and tools and uploaded them to YouTube. To access these, please click on the links below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyD41IhOqsY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvqU3b6Wfno
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_O7iAsumBDw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWjAV687EQc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Vk-C3FAlgo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLF-3mL0UB4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q53zBvBdfbw

© Lara Honos-Webb, PhD, 2008

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